I suspect a lot of the problem there has to do with Imagination Technologies (creator of the PowerVR GPU core in the Poulsbo parts) and how much Imagination Technologies were willing to let Intel release (either as binary drivers or as source code)
One big reason for Google to be interested in Motorola is that, at the time Google bought them, Motorola was making a LOT of noise about using its patent portfolio to go against not just Microsoft and Apple but other Android vendors as well. Which would have hurt Android and hurt Google.
Buying Motorola allowed Google to end that threat.
The current market capitalization of Disney is over $100 billion. I cant find any specific information on Disney but I would expect that the shareholding of Disney is the same as for many large blue-chip companies where significant chunks are owned by entities (index funds, hedge funds, pension funds and others) who are only interested in the short term share price or the next set of quarterly financial numbers.
Personally I think Google could do well to buy one of the big movie studios. (Warner might make a good target) then use that ownership (and seat on the MPAA and etc) to push for a saner copyright system (e.g. one that doesn't place as many requirements on Google and YouTube to look for, censor or remove illegal content themselves and placing greater burden on the owners of the copyright to carry out the policing)
DRM in HTML5 replaces proprietary, often browser-specific and platform-specific plugins like Flash and Silverlight with proprietary browser-specific and platform-specific content decryption modules (which will likely be even MORE tied to specific browsers and platforms)
At least with Flash, you have a reasonable chance of it working in any web browser that supports whatever plugin API the Flash plugin you have actually needs. With the CDMs, expect to see the people who create them specifically tying the CDMs to browsers (and browser versions) they have verified as "safe" (i.e. unable to be used to steal their precious content). It will likely be HARDER to use the CDM plugins with open-source web browsers than it is now with Flash.
A better idea would be a 0.001% tax on all financial transactions (share trades, commodities etc). Small enough that anyone doing it to invest and hold wont be affected but large enough that those doing HFT will find its unprofitable thanks to the tax.
Actually I dont know the exact number that makes sense for this, maybe its not 0.001% (I am not an economist, a tax expert or an investment guy)
You are completly ignoring a number of in-development and in-use technologies that can provide baseload power including solar thermal (which can provide baseload power when used with some form of heat storage such as molten salt), geothermal (just need to find a location where there are hot rocks underneath the earth), biofuels (burning organic material that would otherwise go to waste) and potentially various forms of wave and tidal power.
If we start building these now we can reduce our need for coal fired power stations without needing to build gas power stations to replace them.
I am not saying that we should shut down coal fired power stations right now. I am simply saying that not a cent of government money should go in any way to support such stations. If that means that its more expensive to generate power from coal, great, it makes the business case to shut the stations down and replace with something else even better.
I do also think there should be a complete ban on building ANY new coal fired power stations in this country. And a ban on making existing stations bigger (or re-activating mothballed stations or generating units). Bringing in a ban would force electricity generators to use fuels other than coal going forward and begin the transition towards cleaner burning fuels (and yes, natural gas from the right sources IS cleaner than anything derived from coal)
Solar can very much be baseload (in areas that get lots of sun at least) by using solar thermal generation. The heat from the sun is used to heat molten salt (or another good storage of heat) and then the stored heat is used to generate electricity when the sun isn't shining. There are already examples of this kind of solar power station operating in the real world generating grid electricity.
And solar thermal generation systems can cost a lot less than solar photovoltaic cells to build and run.
As an Aussie and an environmentalist, I consider coal to be evil and think that the less of that dirty black/brown crap we dig out of the ground the better. Plenty of ways to generate electricity (even baseload electricity) without using coal if people are willing to put in the investment. I do not believe the government should be giving a single cent in money to the coal industry or to coal fired power stations (the exception being if the money is to be used to decommission said power stations)
The people who use mainframes for big data (like banks and insurance companies) and the people who use clusters and racks of servers for big data (like search engines, social networking sites and other web companies) have totally different requirements.
At the time the specific Windows OS-level functionality related to thread local storage wasn't supported by GCC so __thread (if it existed at the time, I forget if it id) didn't work the way it should.
If it was purely about disappointment with the GCC maintainers and their unwillingness to fix issues, accept patches, accept features Apple needs etc etc, it would have made more sense to take the well-developed GCC codebase and fork it. Get others who are also disappointed with the slow-pace of mainline FSF GCC to start supporting the new fork too and eventually the fork will most likely either take over as the de-facto implementation (with everyone shifting to it instead of the FSF GCC ala what happened with X when everyone shifted from XFree86 to x.org) or will get merged back into FSF mainline along with promises to make things better.
But of course its not just about Apple hating the GCC devs. Its also about the fact that if Apple was to continue using/developing/distributing GCC (or a number of other pieces of software such as Samba) then they would have to either fork a really old version (not a viable option) or start shipping versions new enough that they are covered under the GPL version 3. And Apple cant ship GPL3 code because of the very broad patent grant clauses in there (which Apple cant accept because it would potentially let their competitors use such as Google use some of their patents for free)
Speaking as someone who actually attempted to hack on GCC in the past (and who actually has a copyright assignment on file with the FSF) I concur with your statements about how crap GCC development has become. I wanted to add Windows thread-local-storage support to GCC (the OS-level logic behind the Visual C++ __declspec(thread) keyword) and even understanding the mess that is the GCC codebase was annoying, let alone trying to find out the right way to get the code to output the necessary assembler into the assembler file (the one that is then compiled with gas). Never did get the feature working and never could get anyone in the GCC development community to point me in the right direction either.
Its GPLv2 (and as far as I can tell there are no restrictions on distributing modified versions of Java, plenty of linux distros seem to do it) so why not fork it and give people who need Java for some reason but dont want the crap that goes with it (crappy bundle-ware, security holes that go unfixed for months etc etc) can get an alternative that doesn't suck.
The issue isn't that they retain the voice samples, its that they store user information for 6 months when they dont need to store user information for longer than it takes to complete the query and return the results.
If Chrome on ChromeOS or on Android supports this standard, why cant the decryption blob be ported to other platforms Chrome runs on and be used that way? If Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera or other browsers choose to support it, the decryption blob can be ported to those APIs too.
The standard as proposed by the W3C will not allow any of the things you have described. All that the standard does is to allow a web site using the existing HTML5 audio and video playback features to feed that content through a decryption plugin that can handle decryption of the content. It doesn't allow web pages to block sending links, copy+paste of text, saving images to disk, printing web sites, hiding/not displaying ads or anything else that doesn't involve HTML6 audio and video playback.
Depending on the browser it should even be possible to block any embedded HTML5 audio and video (encrypted or otherwise) in the same way as you block other HTML elements you don't want visible (or don't want to be loaded at all)
If the Supreme Court rules against gene patents, the biotech companies making the big bucks off these things may well pressure Congress to pass laws to make such patents legal.
The most likely outcome is that AT&T, Comcast etc will take some of their money (including potentially money they were given by the government supposedly to build high-speed broadband) and use it to lobby federal, state and local governments to get Google stopped.
If you were an IT professional you would know that there is a whole pile of software that is either broken under Windows 7 or requires upgrades (that may be expensive) in order to work under Windows 7
What happened to Sierra is a BIG reason I will NEVER give a single cent of my money to Activision Blizzard (and no I wont pirate their content either, I will play games made by companies that dont pull that kind of crap)
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I suspect a lot of the problem there has to do with Imagination Technologies (creator of the PowerVR GPU core in the Poulsbo parts) and how much Imagination Technologies were willing to let Intel release (either as binary drivers or as source code)
I think (based on what I read) MAME wont support gambling games that are still being produced or that are new enough to still be in casinos.
One big reason for Google to be interested in Motorola is that, at the time Google bought them, Motorola was making a LOT of noise about using its patent portfolio to go against not just Microsoft and Apple but other Android vendors as well. Which would have hurt Android and hurt Google.
Buying Motorola allowed Google to end that threat.
The current market capitalization of Disney is over $100 billion. I cant find any specific information on Disney but I would expect that the shareholding of Disney is the same as for many large blue-chip companies where significant chunks are owned by entities (index funds, hedge funds, pension funds and others) who are only interested in the short term share price or the next set of quarterly financial numbers.
Personally I think Google could do well to buy one of the big movie studios. (Warner might make a good target) then use that ownership (and seat on the MPAA and etc) to push for a saner copyright system (e.g. one that doesn't place as many requirements on Google and YouTube to look for, censor or remove illegal content themselves and placing greater burden on the owners of the copyright to carry out the policing)
DRM in HTML5 replaces proprietary, often browser-specific and platform-specific plugins like Flash and Silverlight with proprietary browser-specific and platform-specific content decryption modules (which will likely be even MORE tied to specific browsers and platforms)
At least with Flash, you have a reasonable chance of it working in any web browser that supports whatever plugin API the Flash plugin you have actually needs. With the CDMs, expect to see the people who create them specifically tying the CDMs to browsers (and browser versions) they have verified as "safe" (i.e. unable to be used to steal their precious content). It will likely be HARDER to use the CDM plugins with open-source web browsers than it is now with Flash.
None of which will be an option in the USA because US laws are backwards-thinking and ban any headlight tech that's in any way modern.
A better idea would be a 0.001% tax on all financial transactions (share trades, commodities etc). Small enough that anyone doing it to invest and hold wont be affected but large enough that those doing HFT will find its unprofitable thanks to the tax.
Actually I dont know the exact number that makes sense for this, maybe its not 0.001% (I am not an economist, a tax expert or an investment guy)
You are completly ignoring a number of in-development and in-use technologies that can provide baseload power including solar thermal (which can provide baseload power when used with some form of heat storage such as molten salt), geothermal (just need to find a location where there are hot rocks underneath the earth), biofuels (burning organic material that would otherwise go to waste) and potentially various forms of wave and tidal power.
If we start building these now we can reduce our need for coal fired power stations without needing to build gas power stations to replace them.
I am not saying that we should shut down coal fired power stations right now. I am simply saying that not a cent of government money should go in any way to support such stations. If that means that its more expensive to generate power from coal, great, it makes the business case to shut the stations down and replace with something else even better.
I do also think there should be a complete ban on building ANY new coal fired power stations in this country. And a ban on making existing stations bigger (or re-activating mothballed stations or generating units). Bringing in a ban would force electricity generators to use fuels other than coal going forward and begin the transition towards cleaner burning fuels (and yes, natural gas from the right sources IS cleaner than anything derived from coal)
Solar can very much be baseload (in areas that get lots of sun at least) by using solar thermal generation. The heat from the sun is used to heat molten salt (or another good storage of heat) and then the stored heat is used to generate electricity when the sun isn't shining. There are already examples of this kind of solar power station operating in the real world generating grid electricity.
And solar thermal generation systems can cost a lot less than solar photovoltaic cells to build and run.
As an Aussie and an environmentalist, I consider coal to be evil and think that the less of that dirty black/brown crap we dig out of the ground the better. Plenty of ways to generate electricity (even baseload electricity) without using coal if people are willing to put in the investment.
I do not believe the government should be giving a single cent in money to the coal industry or to coal fired power stations (the exception being if the money is to be used to decommission said power stations)
The people who use mainframes for big data (like banks and insurance companies) and the people who use clusters and racks of servers for big data (like search engines, social networking sites and other web companies) have totally different requirements.
At the time the specific Windows OS-level functionality related to thread local storage wasn't supported by GCC so __thread (if it existed at the time, I forget if it id) didn't work the way it should.
If it was purely about disappointment with the GCC maintainers and their unwillingness to fix issues, accept patches, accept features Apple needs etc etc, it would have made more sense to take the well-developed GCC codebase and fork it. Get others who are also disappointed with the slow-pace of mainline FSF GCC to start supporting the new fork too and eventually the fork will most likely either take over as the de-facto implementation (with everyone shifting to it instead of the FSF GCC ala what happened with X when everyone shifted from XFree86 to x.org) or will get merged back into FSF mainline along with promises to make things better.
But of course its not just about Apple hating the GCC devs. Its also about the fact that if Apple was to continue using/developing/distributing GCC (or a number of other pieces of software such as Samba) then they would have to either fork a really old version (not a viable option) or start shipping versions new enough that they are covered under the GPL version 3. And Apple cant ship GPL3 code because of the very broad patent grant clauses in there (which Apple cant accept because it would potentially let their competitors use such as Google use some of their patents for free)
Speaking as someone who actually attempted to hack on GCC in the past (and who actually has a copyright assignment on file with the FSF) I concur with your statements about how crap GCC development has become. I wanted to add Windows thread-local-storage support to GCC (the OS-level logic behind the Visual C++ __declspec(thread) keyword) and even understanding the mess that is the GCC codebase was annoying, let alone trying to find out the right way to get the code to output the necessary assembler into the assembler file (the one that is then compiled with gas). Never did get the feature working and never could get anyone in the GCC development community to point me in the right direction either.
Its GPLv2 (and as far as I can tell there are no restrictions on distributing modified versions of Java, plenty of linux distros seem to do it) so why not fork it and give people who need Java for some reason but dont want the crap that goes with it (crappy bundle-ware, security holes that go unfixed for months etc etc) can get an alternative that doesn't suck.
The issue isn't that they retain the voice samples, its that they store user information for 6 months when they dont need to store user information for longer than it takes to complete the query and return the results.
If Chrome on ChromeOS or on Android supports this standard, why cant the decryption blob be ported to other platforms Chrome runs on and be used that way? If Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera or other browsers choose to support it, the decryption blob can be ported to those APIs too.
The standard as proposed by the W3C will not allow any of the things you have described. All that the standard does is to allow a web site using the existing HTML5 audio and video playback features to feed that content through a decryption plugin that can handle decryption of the content. It doesn't allow web pages to block sending links, copy+paste of text, saving images to disk, printing web sites, hiding/not displaying ads or anything else that doesn't involve HTML6 audio and video playback.
Depending on the browser it should even be possible to block any embedded HTML5 audio and video (encrypted or otherwise) in the same way as you block other HTML elements you don't want visible (or don't want to be loaded at all)
My Nokia N900 also has side tone support (through a Nokia closed-source PulseAudio module)
If the Supreme Court rules against gene patents, the biotech companies making the big bucks off these things may well pressure Congress to pass laws to make such patents legal.
The most likely outcome is that AT&T, Comcast etc will take some of their money (including potentially money they were given by the government supposedly to build high-speed broadband) and use it to lobby federal, state and local governments to get Google stopped.
Its a bootloader unlock to let you run custom kernels and stuff.
If you were an IT professional you would know that there is a whole pile of software that is either broken under Windows 7 or requires upgrades (that may be expensive) in order to work under Windows 7
What happened to Sierra is a BIG reason I will NEVER give a single cent of my money to Activision Blizzard (and no I wont pirate their content either, I will play games made by companies that dont pull that kind of crap)